I wrote an article about Debian which will appear in the May issue of
Linuxworld Magazine. The print version
isn't out yet but there is a .PDF you can download
here.
The article for some strange reason is not in the table of contents, you
can find it on pages 44-47.

If you've seen my
"Introducing Debian GNU/Linux" flyer, then you'll recognize most
of the contents of this article as I basically took that and added some more
hyperbole and a goofy headshot.

Wednesday night was Mahashivaratri. There was a record crowd at our
mandir which meant long delays in getting darshan. I spent the night
praying (and drank bhang) so I was totally out of commission on
Thursday. Today I'm mostly recovered though.

Speaking of Indian matters, it looks like Debian-IN is finally
getting off the ground. I now have a couple of volunteers and the first
packages should be along soon.

Today (well, yesterday by now) I attended a meeting on Debians'
behalf of several New York-area free software groups. The meetings
agenda was to try and begin to organize a replacement for Linuxworld
which as of next year is moving to Boston. Committees were formed to
work on various tasks. Yours truly is doing the vital task of
name/logo/mission statement brainstorming. More news as it happens.

While packaging the latest webmin version I had an interesting time
trying to figure out how to do stuff to files with names like
config-*-linux. The trouble is '*' gets interpreted as a wildcard
character. Normally in bash on the commandline to get a literal '*' you
would just do this: config-\*-linux. But in a makefile, it gets
converted to config-\\*-linux. Increasing the number of slashes was
suggested but to no avail. The correct answer is $$'config-*-linux'
(You have to use two dollar signs so it doesn't get interpreted as a
make variable.)

Februarys' Linux Journal has an article by Doc
Searls (the man of bronze?) called "DIY-IT: How Linux And Open Source
Are Bringing Do-It-Yourself to Information Technology" which includes
the following quote:

"I'm seeing far more Debian than any report gives it credit for",
says one technologist working for a large vendor that has partnerships
with Red Hat and SuSE. "Red Hat and SuSE may sell more, so they show
up on surveys that follow sales. But in terms of implementation, Debian
is pretty big."

Some of you may already know my theory on how the location of the .org
pavilion indicates the health of the Linux business world. For those
who don't, here's an explanation. In the glory days of yore when Red
Hat and VA Linux had mega-IPOs, Mozilla was open sourced, and the
penguin hordes were about to reduce Redmond to a charred and smoking
ruin, the .org pavilion was relegated to the very back of the show
floor. As times became more dire, it started creeping up until the fell
winter of 2003 when it was actually in the front where ordinary people
could see it. This year it was in the middle and to the left side so I
predict a good year for the Linux industry. The booth was your basic
10' x 10' at the end of a row with a table, two chairs and a waste paper
basket. We had one ethernet feed so had to bring in a hub. There was
supposed to be WiFi access but hardly anyone ever got it working.

Debian developers manning the booth this year for one or more days were
Clint Adams, Phil Blundell, Adam DiCarlo, Jimmy Kaplowitz, Joe Nahmias,
Matt Taggart, and myself. We were also visited by Andres Saloman,
Laurence Lane, and Bruce Perens who wanted to get his key signed so he
can get back into Debian development with his
User Linux initiative.

We decided we were going to do some proper PR this year but had some
mixed results some of which were due to totally underestimating the
response we thought we would get. I was going to produce posters and
flyers. The first printer I
approached to make the posters botched the job so at the last minute I
had to have one made at Kinkos. They charged a hideous amount of money
so I only had one made. The flyers were good but I didn't make enough
and they were gone by Thursday morning. Kinkos struck again with the
banner Jimmy was going to have made. It never showed up. Luckily we
didn't pay for it either because once again they charged way too much.
Matt and Adams' efforts were more fruitful. Matt brought swirl
t-shirts, this year in powder blue with "debian/rules" on the back. (We
also had a box of beige shirts with Tux on the front courtesy of
TinyApps.org.) and Debian stickers and case
badges. They were a huge hit as always. Adam did a phenomenal job in
procuring CD donations. They also flew out of our hands in breathtaking
quantities. One slight miscalculation was I asked him to get lots of Sarge
netinst CDs with beta 2 of the new installer. My reasoning was that the
perennial complaint is that "Debian is too hard to install." so people
would be really interested in trying our new installer. But it turned
out it was 7-cd sets of Woody which people were really interested in
which surprised us all. All these efforts netted us as a total of over
$2,000 for the project, a substantial increase over last year.

Once again Sun lent us a computer and once again
we had trouble getting Debian installed on it. (Though for a different
reason than last time.) We gave up and showed Debian on our laptops.
Phil had an IPaq too which looked really cool. Over in the
KDE booth they were demoing KDE on Debian machines
and our favorite distro was to be found scattered throughout other
booths too.

Last year the big event which drew people to us from other distros was
Mandrakes' bankruptcy. This year it was
Red Hats' refocus of their distribution. Now I
understand their reasons (and I'm not just saying that because of the
gift of a cardigan I got for attending a presentation for RHCEs) but it
has a lot of their customers and supporters worried and Debian is looking
like a tempting option for such people. Over all, I was impressed by
the more sophisticated knowledge of the various distributions people
were showing. Well I did get one person asking me "what is a Linux
distribution?" but that was only one. Debian seems to have much better
name recognition these days. Even novices want to use Debian. I felt I
had to caution them, "Are you sure? Debian is not the most
newbie-friendly distribution." but no they wanted Debian. A lot of this
publicity is due to commercial distributions like
LibraNet, Lindows,
and Xandros as wells as Live CDs like
Knoppix and Morphix
which are based on Debian.

On Friday, I was interviewed
by SYS-CON radio and may also do an article about Debian for Linuxworld
magazine which they publish. The interview went pretty well. I didn't
mumble or ramble on too much. I forgot most of the DFSG and social
contract which is a little embarrassing but did manage to mention the
more salient bits.

Next year the show is leaving New York for Boston so this may be my last
as an Exhibitor but I had a good time and met many interesting people.
Getting thankyous from satisfied Debian users really makes all the work
worthwhile.

I Jump On Bandwagons Jackie Chan style
In a typical pattern for me I got so enthusiastic about blogging I went got
myself 4. All of which now are in total desuetude. My solution? write
myself software for a master blog from which I shall update all the
others. Yeah that's the ticket.

Talk At LILUG
So what have I been up to lately? Last Tuesday I gave a talk at the Long
Island Linux Users Group (LILUG.) It
was originally going to be about IMAP but we ended up discussing Debian
instead. Get involved in your local LUG it's good fun.

Indian language support in Qt
Version 3.2.0b1 of Trolltechs' Qt
toolkit now has more complete support for Unicode encoded Indian languages.
The Debian maintainer is saying it's going to be a while before there are
official packages so I made my own and voila! all KDE apps are now able
to display Hindi, Sanskrit, Gujarati etc. It's not perfect. Jodaksharas do
not seem to be supported so for instance vya in my surname is shown as
v-virama-ya but at least it's readable. Now to figure out how to do input.

pgp4pine Debian Package
I did an NMU as the package was totally broken. I fixed all extant bugs
including a release-critical one and updated it to the latest version.

njudge
This isn't quite free software but the source is available. It's software
for playing and adjudicating games of Diplomacy via email. We recently
released version 1.4.0 which fixes
many bugs and adds some new variants and other features. I did the autotools
stuff and will also make .rpms and .debs

MichaelCrawford, Ankh
As a devout Hindu, and someone who belongs to a very traditional part of
Indian society, I must warn you that the idea that mental health is better
in India because of "meditation and insight" is bullshit.

For most of the rural poor mental healthcare amounts to little more than
being locked away somewhere to rot. It just so happens that asylums are
often located near places of pilgrimage but this is more so the inmates
can find support through begging than any religious imperative.

Also there can be mental issues but taking different forms. Take for
example the condition of women. You cannot make a blanket statement about
the whole country but it is true that in many cases women are in a
subordinate position socially. But you have the phenomon of possession by
a Goddess. I've seen this in Temples in America too. During a festival,
with the premises packed, and after several hours of intense chanting and
praying, a women, typically middle-aged and married, will suddenly start
moving violently and speaking in a strange voice. People will say (in
Gujarati) "Mataji avya chhe." (Mother has come.) Through the woman the
Goddess will deliver some oracle. One way to look at this might be as
some kind of disorder but why not look at it as a culturally sanctioned
way of establishing womens worth? Men may be able to dismiss a silly girl
but they cannot argue with the Mother of the Universe!

Having said all that actually I do agree that mental health is overall
better in India and religion is the cause. But the reason is not that
individualistic meditation is taught. (That has tradionally been the
domain of solitary monks. If it has changed in resent times it is more
due to California than the Himalayas.) Rather the central value is Dharma
which is primarily about ritual acts and social obligations. One defines
oneself by ones network of social relationships ranging from in the family
to in the cosmos. Thus people feel secure knowing where they are in the
grand scheme of things. Of course it is not a panacea (in particular it
sucks if you are at the bottom of the social heap) but I think the lack of
community, real community not rhetoric, makes Westerners more vulnerable
to mental stress.

dovecot .debs
As there are no better ideas, today I'm going to split up the
dovecot package into 4 pieces.
Here is the background. Dovecot is an IMAP server that like all IMAP servers
listens on port 143 (or 993 for IMAP over SSL.) This means in Debian package
dependency terms that dovecot must 'Provide:' the virtual package imap-server.
It also needs to 'Conflict:' with imap-server because only one daemon can have
the port. Now it has gained a POP3 server component. So it also has to
provide and conflict with pop3-server for the same reason. The thing is it is
possible that a user may want the IMAP server but turn off the POP3 server and
use, say, qpopper instead. But he can't install qpopper because it also
provides pop3-server which conflicts with dovecot. The only solution is to
split it into dovecot-imap and dovecot-pop3 with dovecot-common for the shared
bits. The fourth package called dovecot is simply a dummy which installs
dovecot-imap to allow smooth upgrades. This is one area where Gentoo has us beat at the moment. I
don't know if there is an ebuild for dovecot but theoretically hey can
specify "give me just the IMAP piece not the POP3" in some configuration
somewhere. It will be interesting to see if Debian can come up with some
solution to this. Having lots of little packages around is icky. The dummy
package could be avoided by having dpkg use a field called 'Replacement-for:'
or similiar (not 'Replaces:' which is something else.) IIRC, this idea was
suggested before but no one ever implemented it.

Deadbeat Maintainers
Wow it looks like asuffield went through with his list of
maintainers
with excessive old release-critical bugs. Although there may be some false
positives this is an important first step in getting rid of some of the cruft
(human and package) in Debian which we desperately need to do if we ever hope
to release sarge anytime soon.

Taxes (or Dear Prudence)
Another gorgeous day. Too bad I had to spend most of it running around doing my
taxes. Last year was our worst ever financially thanks to the rotten economy but
we still kept up our quality of life thanks to prudent budgeting and investments.
Some of our friends who went nuts during the dot-com bubble are really hurting
though.

Dadvogato
Happy birthday Chloe! dyork do keep us informed of her
progress. My little girl is 17 months old and amazes me every day with the new
things she learns. Here's a tip for when Chloe starts walking and touching
things in earnest: Velcro anything valuable to the ceiling. Preferably a
ceiling in another house.

nymia
Screen scraping is so '90s! All the cool kids are using XML-RPC.

madhatter
There's one kind of politics which is on-topic for the hacker community and
that is the openness of information. My threat was absurd but in response to
another absurdity. My understanding is that the trust metric is related not to
your personality (else I would be a superfunkygrandmaster instead of a
journeyer) but your contributions to free software. For instance I don't
much care for some of rms's ideas or the way they are
expressed but it doesn't stop me from thinking he is a frickin' genius or
using ls, grep, etc. By all means people should shun
mglazer if his PHP code is crap but not because they don't
like his views. And if one is going to ban politics, do it fairly. All
the anti-war comments have to go too. (Though I like the life-related
comments in general as it helps put a human face on the people who provide our
software.)

cmillerOn the contrary I would like to think I would defend the anti-glazer in the same way. Working in New York I'm constantly harangued by people whose politics are diametrically opposite to mine. Plus I'm regularly exposed to things that offend me as a Hindu such as advertising for Big Macs. But we have to tolerate them because...there is no other way to live together. Really how hard is it to just ignore the diaries of people one isn't interested in? I'm seeing some extreme reactions to an extremely small deal.

mglazerI'm flattered but please decertify me. You don't know me so that would be an abuse of the principles that govern this site.